It would be very strange indeed if, in year 2020, radio is using this codec and television is using this codec and cable is using this codec and DVRs are using this codec and Blurays are using this codec...... but the internet did not. The web would be the odd man out.

Really? I'd think a good codec would have a longer useful life. I mean, mp3 is going on 17 years at this point. JPEG is around 20 years old. MPEG-2 is still being used in DVDs and BDs today and is 15 years old (BD requires h.264 support as well, though). I think you have the law of diminishing returns. How much better can we really do than h.264? It took a while to get audio right, but once it got 'good enough' (mp3), any minor improvements weren't enough to overcome the inertia mp3s had already gained. Same with JPEGs and PNGs. After a certain point, the minor improvements just aren't enough to win over the inertia gained by the previous codec. In order to beat h.264, you have to be significantly better, and h.264 is pretty darn good.

HEVC [wikipedia.org] is aiming for a 50% reduction in bit rate for the same subjective quality, while increasing the complexity no more than 200%. A few candidate solutions have been able to get similar quality, at lower bit rates, all while decreasing the complexity. It's likely that by the time the standard is completed, it will be a lot better than h.264.

This doesn't matter as much for disc-based media, but a 50% reduction in bit rate means its cheaper to push it over the web, even if decoding it on the other end takes more time. If it takes off like AVC, then a lot of devices will include dedicated hardware to decode it. A big part of the reason phones, iPods, etc. are able to get such good life on video playback is that they have dedicated hardware to deal with certain codecs.

The reason that good codecs stick around is that there's a lot of hardware that will play/display them. A lot of people still have DVD-players so MPEG-2 still gets used because that's what the player expects, even though MPEG-2 isn't all that good compared to h.264. MP3 is still around because there are still tons of MP3 players and almost any device that can output audio continues to include MP3 support because it's cheap to do so.

h.264 is good, but h.265 of whatever they decide to call it will be even better, especially if it significantly reduces bandwidth consumption.

The question is, is h.264 good enough to fork over a shitload of royalties for?

You only have to pay if you are charging for your h.264 content.

Irrespective of that, if h.264 is, say, X% dearer than another codec, but uses Y% less bandwidth, there will be a point where it will be cheaper simply because content suppliers and/or customers will be saving money.

MP3 is popular for home use, but is virtually unused in terms of commercial use relative to AAC and other proprietary formats. JPEG remains popular because it reached the point where it was "good enough", with later competing codecs not offering a sufficient advantage to justify the pain of trying to move everybody to a new format. MPEG-2's video codec is still used in DVDs, and is *supported* by bluray, but BluRays encoded with MPEG-2 is extremely rare (pretty much everything is h.264 or VC1, mostly h.264).

Audio and still-image compression is not a field where large gains can be had so easily. If I produce a still-image codec that is 25% more efficient, then maybe I can save 5300 images on my SD card instead of 4000... but that's not going to make much difference. Same in terms of audio; I don't really care if my MP3 player can store 388 hours of audio or 517 hours. Audio has reached the point where we tend to encode everything at the same bitrate regardless of compression efficiency. In fact, uncompressed digital audio isn't exactly rare. CDs aren't compressed, and increasingly movies ship with lossless audio. We've reached a cap in terms of audio quality (more data doesn't help), but storage capacities keep going up.

Video, on the other hand, is a big deal. In terms of streaming, the amount of bandwidth required to compress good quality 1080p video still exceeds the connection speed of most broadband connections in north America (let alone disc-quality). On top of that, there's an increasing trend towards bandwidth caps.

Bell Canada in Ontario has a 25GB cap on usage. If we assume 5Mbps video (enough for 720p, at least), a consumer can only afford to watch about 23 minutes of video per day. If you double the compression efficiency (as the successor to h.264 aims to do), that becomes a *very* big deal. You can afford to stream much higher quality video to those with limited connection speeds, or stream a lot more video to those with limited transfer caps, or store more content on a disc. The impact would be felt enormously almost anywhere video is used.

Getting back to replacing h.264, let's examine a bit about how long it took h.264 to become ubiquitous. It's mostly replaced previous codecs, as it's now the dominant codec for consumer consumption. Your cellphone and video camera record to it, your disc-based movies use it, increasingly your television service uses it, your streaming video uses it, etc. h.264 was standardized in 2003. 7 years later, it's unquestionably the dominant standard. This was even true a year or two ago, so we might stretch this a bit and say that 5 years was enough for h.264 to go mainstream.

h.264's sucessor, HVEC, is scheduled to be finalized in 2012, with a targeted improvement over h.264 of 100% (same quality at 50% bitrate) By 2020, 8 years will have passed since "h.265" was standardized. At that point, I would fully expect it to be the dominant codec in use.

I guess that the reason that something better hasn't emerged is the combination of the patent thicket around wavelets, and all the shenanegans the digital camera manufacturers have been playing with raw formats.

h.264 can't do VHS quality at 50Kbps, especially not if you include audio.

I might agree with 150-200Kbps, but even that's going to have to use special low-bitrate audio codecs like HE-AAC where the upper frequencies and stereo information is sort of faked. It was claimed that WMV9 (the basis for VC-1, which is closer to MPEG-4 ASP than h.264) claimed they could do VHS-quality at 250Kbps, and that was stretching the truth a bit.

As to get back to your original question, "You think there's a codec more advance

If I could change the OS on my TV, I would. It has a USB port that I'd like to be able to use for other things. Of course I'd have to have most of the base functionality. I'd sure like to add wake-on-signal...

Yes! This would be great to have. I have media centers attached to all my TV's, but still need the TV remotes just to turn them on and off. A wake-on-lan for my TV would keep it down to one remote (or phone, web interface, etc.).

If I could change the OS on my TV, I would. It has a USB port that I'd like to be able to use for other things. Of course I'd have to have most of the base functionality. I'd sure like to add wake-on-signal...

My TV is running Linux, how about yours? I found out about this because LG thoughtfully included a copy of the GPL at the end of their user manual. (I would definitely buy LG again.) It's very likely this Linux is upgradeable, i.e., hackable, which might be fun.

Since when has the web been anything like TV, Radio, or physical media, and why should it be? Much better to use a free codec than have to have your browser developer or whoever waste money on licensing.

All those devices use hardware decoding, which has also made it into modern GPU's. What it comes down to is that either we go back to offloading decoding onto the CPU, forget about this for mobile and its going backwards even on the desktop, or separate hardware will need to be developed which will be more expensive than the h264 hardware because that will have a scale advantage since everybody else is using it. In short if Google gets its way we're in for a real "win" for consumers: either we get choppy pl

If Google wins this, we will have choppy playback because of software decoding or we get more expensive hardware but at least the videos can be played anywhere, on any system and you're free to implement it in any product you choose to develop. If H.264 wins this, we will only have video playback on Windows and MacOS X, but at least you'll have your smooth playback. That's not enough for me, though.

If they (Google) were really concerned about openness they'd spend the money fighting software patents instead which is the real underlying issue here. But there's not much chance of that [google.com].

Good luck, you are going to need it. Like Gruber said [daringfireball.net] (about Theora) "Put another way, 'open and better' is a recipe for success; 'open but worse' is a recipe for obscurity." With the current lack of hardware support, especially on mobile devices, the latter looks more likely. Even if eventually it'll be "open and as good", that's probably not going to cut it with so many companies already aboard the h.264 train.

Well, I haven't looked into it, but it may still be able to offload the decoding to the GPU, just not to hardware designed specifically for that actual codec. That shouldn't be any more expensive, but it would probably use a lot more power.

Absolutely. Which is why no DVD player can handle DivX, and why MP3 never made the jump to mobile phones and even dedicated devices. And, regarding your choice of time span, which is why we all still use VHS. Right. You do not honestly believe H.264 in its current form will be around in 10 years in any other use than to convert legacy media to its successor's successor?

How relevant will TV, radio, Blu-ray etc be in 2020? CD sales are already being replaced by digital downloads and while a lot of people continue to listen to the radio, they often do so by streaming it over the net. I see no reason why the future would be different for video.

How relevant will TV, radio, Blu-ray etc be in 2020? CD sales are already being replaced by digital downloads and while a lot of people continue to listen to the radio, they often do so by streaming it over the net. I see no reason why the future would be different for video.

Yes, all of those are already being streamed over the net or downloaded... using MPEG-4 standards.Maybe Google should be promoting VP8 by bribing release groups to use it:-)

With everybody clamping down on limits and "excessive" usage, most of North America will need BluRay. Most other places too 50 GB is much cheaper to deliver by disc, not online. Sure, for the urban population in high tech countries moving to an all online solution will work but BluRay isn't going anywhere. That and torrents, until they get their head out of their ass and realize things are on torrents hours after broadcast and anything I like I will watch as soon as it is available, the only question is if

It would be very strange indeed if, in year 2020, radio is using this codec and television is using this codec and cable is using this codec and DVRs are using this codec and Blurays are using this codec...... but the internet did not. The web would be the odd man out.

Will the H.264 patents have expired in nine years?

If not, then it's a non-starter for the Web. Patented algorithms are illegal to distribute in GPLed implementations like Firefox or Chromium.

Adopt H.264 as a universal standard, and you can kiss the GPL goodbye. If that's your preferred end-game for the Web, you might as well just say so up-front.

Both Firefox and Safari have taken a huge chunk of the market. [...] Safari takes up 5% [...].

For a very kind definition of "huge". With Apple's market share in the desktop and laptop world somewhere between 4 and 10%, depending on who you ask, those 5% look rather bleak to me. Either they barely manage to keep their few hardware customers from jumping ship or they lose about half of the many Mac users to competing browsers. Neither option sounds much like a success.

Well, you would expect the OS and browser stats of the same company to be consistent since they come from the same http headers. On NetApplications it says 5.02% Macs and 5.89% Safari. I've never heard of anyone using Safari on anything but Mac, so I guess this means most Mac users use it as well as 1-2% that are probably Mac users forced to work on Windows. Not, surprising, since Apple has very little reason to push their web browser on the Windows platform, they're interested in selling Macs.

There's something fundamentally perverse about developers making efforts to remove features from their products, and/or issue press releases bragging about features they will not offer. It's almost as if they had some agenda other than making their software more useful to end-users and content publishers.

The problem here is that multiple parties all have valid conflicts of interest, but lack of standardization hurts us all. Here's how:

Fragmentation promotes Flash which leaves us all stuck with a single vendor proprietary solution that will have poor security and performance.

Browser promoting WebM means everyone with an existing mobile device and many people with mobile devices being made for some number of years going forward will lack hardware support for that format, resulting in crappy battery life.

Maybe the Linux community will see this as a more important change than most people, due to their software options. (Obviously, Linux users aren't huge Internet Explorer users, nor do they use Safari browser as a rule. They're also more likely than others to use a version of the Opera browser.) But all in all? Apple was just recently pushing H.264 as one of their preferred codecs, so it'd be crazy for them to go along with pulling it from Safari. (Didn't they just recently convince YouTube to convert a

I remember the days when computers had these things called codecs, and you could simply add support for just about any format. No one ever removed functionality, it was all about adding support for more and more formats.

JPEG, GIF and MP3 all have/had encumbered with licenses yet they are still to this day, web standards. I never hear anyone complain about seeing JPEG's on their web page be it web developer or end user. It's only an issue to people who place ideals over practicality. People are listening to billions of AAC and MP3 files on a daily basis without complaint (and with hardware support).

Which leads me to the next point. What practical reason do I have for wanting h.264 support in a browser? Because I get hardware-based decoding with h.264. It saves my battery time and leaves my CPU free to do other more important tasks. With WebM or Theora I get software decoding and thus a less responsive machine with a shorter battery life.

Perhaps most importantly, the MPEG group have time and time again have brought us the best codecs for digital media. Given Theora's performance compared to WebM and h.264, I certainly hope Ogg isn't responsible for pushing r&d into codecs for the future. Open source is great. I use it every day and can't imagine how much more difficult computing would be without it but the great bulk of its work has been with reproducing free/open versions of existing products and paradigms, not at pushing the boundaries of research and development.

You know, we complained endlessly when Microsoft fragmented the web user experience for years...why are some of us giving Mozilla and Google a free pass when, however noble the motivation, they are trying to do the same thing?

Both wildly successfull, huh ? I guess you see PNG used these days but how long did it take to become moderately popular and today does your camera save PNG's or still those nasty encumbered JPG's ?

The only reason you have hardware-based decoding with h.264 is because Intel/AMD/Nvidia were ask/told/paid to do so.If someone adds WebM hardware-based decoding, people will flock to it.

Everyone is already buying h.264 hardware. It has been tested, it's cheaper 'cause everybody already buys it and it offers compatibility with already available content. Do you think they'll flock to hardware they'll have to support in addition to existing hardware (for backwards compatibility reasons) with all so

Ogg Vorbis is pretty common standard for video game audio because you don't have to pay royalties for implementation. So in that way it's pretty damn successful. Speex (their voice chat codec) is also fairly commonly used for VoIP, presumably for the same reason.

the MPEG group have time and time again have brought us the best codecs for digital media

Best but illegal. Illegal is not a starter for a universal standard. Why are we even having this conversation?

When the MPEG-LA patents expire, then and not before will H.264 be in the running for a standard. Till then, there's "open" and there's "illegal", and MPEG-LA have decided to make implementing their algorithm in GPL code illegal. So sad, thank you for playing, next. End of line.

You know, we complained endlessly when Microsoft fragmented the web user experience for years...why are some of us giving MPEG-LA a free pass when, however shiny their beads and blankets are, they are trying to do the same thing?

At least now we have some what of a chance to have an open web without any plugins. Gif, Jpget and Png are already free and now since over half the web browsers (Chrome have 10%, Firefox have 40%, Opera have 5% [or some what in that region]) won't support H264 the web sites have to use either Ogg or WebM at least as a second option. But since you have to convert your movies either to Ogg or WebM anyway and you don't need to pay license fees with the two, web sites are good to use just Ogg or WebM and just l

People are really glossing over the IMPORTANT side of this decision - YouTube.

YouTube is by far the largest source of online video on the web, and it is owned by Google. Until now, YouTube's HTML5 version used H.264 encoding. By dropping H.264 from Chrome, Google would in effect be making YouTube incompatible with their own browser. They are not going to do that.

What this points to, is YouTube is very likely to switch to WebM itself for HTML 5 video in the near future. This has HUGE ramifications since IE 9

Opera are against everything and everyone, while their actual market share consists only of a hardcore minority. In other words, nobody from the real world actually cares what Opera think, and there is no news here.

Opera's user base is only a hardcore minority? You want to take that outside punk?!?
Just kidding, not like I'm ever going AFK

Yes,.264 is that big. It's embedded into just about every consumer electronics device that plays video. All the smartphones have hardware accelerated.264, all the settop boxes have.264, etc. It's not that these things couldn't get WebM support, its that it took 6 years of arguing in committees and standards boards to get everyone to agree on h.264 and then another 3 years or so for a significant number of products to end up on store shelves and then another couple of years before those devices became a major percentage of devices. Basically you're looking at around 10 years to go from codec to ubiquity.

Why would it "probably" be as patent encumbered as h.264? Google claims no patents at least, so that would in this case be if it's too similar in some regard to MPEG LA patents. But if we are to dismiss codecs on the basis of pessimistic probably's, we won't approve a single modern video codec at all. What matters is that the format has, after scrutiny of the FSF, been endorsed, that Google has irrevocably released all patents of VP8, and that there are signs that On2 made an effort to avoid MPEG LA patents in designing the format [conecta.it]. It doesn't really get much better than that. We'll always have the doubters, the pessimists, but we can't base decisions on possibilities, only facts. At least in a world that is moving forward as quickly as the IT world.

When H.264 was designed, a strong attempt was made to avoid any patent encumbrances. (Or, more precisely, to keep the codec entirely royalty free.) It didn't work, and this is not likely to work for the same reasons.

Dark Shikari, a developer of x264, made an extensive analysis of WebM / VP8 [multimedia.cx]. Here is his summary regarding patents and VP8 (for details read the blog):

Finally, the problem of patents appears to be rearing its ugly head again. VP8 is simply way too similar to H.264: a pithy, if slightly inaccurate, description of VP8 would be “H.264 Baseline Profile with a better entropy coder”. Even VC-1 differed more from H.264 than VP8 does, and even VC-1 didn’t manage to escape the clutches of softwar

Anything worth keeping is also worth fighting for. The problem is that a large number of people do not actually do anything to protect the things they value. If you want to see a world without patent abuse, you have to actively engage - donate to the EFF, call your Congressman/woman, educate people on the issues, buy some advertisements, etc, etc.

Naah. At least this way we won't go back to the days when to view a video you needed 10 different plugins from 10 different vendors.

Or we could... use... flash, till someone write a proper codec with no strings attached? You know flash? Its that thing the web's been using for a few years now. Yeah I know its proprietry, but the player is free.

And cross-platform. We just got a big snowstorm here in Illinois, and when I went to look up road conditions [gettingaro...linois.com], the page informed me that Silverlight is required -- and Silverlight won't run in Linux, [microsoft.com] nor will it run on any version of Windows prior to XP, or on an old Mac ( just acquired an old Mac a few nights ago).

Yup, there is very little evidence other than Google's claims that WebM is really patent-free.

There was a VERY good analysis of WebM from one of the x264 developers (admittedly there could be bias there, but my opinion was that it was high on technical content but low on bias.) - http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377 [multimedia.cx]

There was at least one component of WebM that the x264 developer felt WAS patent-encumbered. However there is a potential for a prior art challenge on that one.

Every time this comes up the meme is that they're waiting for someone with deep pockets to sue. Well, Google has extremely deep pockets. If Google can use it with impunity without getting sued, you can be sure this is nothing but patent FUD. And if Google is sued, well at least there will be a real trial on the validity of the patents. Either way there's no reason for Opera or Mozilla or anyone else not to join in as long as Google leads the flock.

Now the question is, why in hell should my browser support H264 when it's the OS that should support it? That's the exact reason for a Standard. Support by the OS and keep the many software packages as lean as possible and yet everyone is bitching that Opera and Chrome have dropped support when Firefox included it since it's supported by the OS through a plug-in. Windows Media Player for MS and Quicktime for Apple. What does *nix have? Nothing legal that I'm aware of

Basically, a formal statement of the Not Invented Here attitude problem. Never mind the fact that, say, the H.264 codec installed in all modern OSs is probably substantially better (and properly licensed, if needed) than the one included as an afterthought by your browser...

Still waiting for them to start shipping their own printer drivers, too. You know, in case there's an inconsistency. Because at least as many people print from their browser as watch video in it, so I don't see why the same reasoning

According to the “Summary of AVC/H.264 License Terms,” which you can download from the MPEG LA site (www.mpegla.com/ avc/avc-agreement.cfm), there are no royalties for free internet broadcast (there are, however, royalties for pay-per-view or subscription video) until Dec. 31, 2010 [extended to 2014]. After that, “the royalty shall be no more than the economic equivalent of royalties payable during the same time for free television.”This makes royalties payable for “free television” the best predictor of where internet royalties will stand in 2011. Under the terms of the agreement, you have two options: a one-time payment of $2,500 “per AVC transmission encoder” or an annual fee starting at “$2,500 per calendar year per Broadcast Markets of at least 100,000 but no more than 499,999 television households, $5,000 per calendar year per Broadcast Market which includes at least 500,000 but no more than 999,999 television households, and $10,000 per calendar year per Broadcast Market which includes at 1,000,000 or more television households.”

Firefox would violate the GPL if they provided actual h.264 support in any manner other than a user-addable plugin for it. Simply put, they're going to HAVE to find some other way- because that quote you're referring to is not in perpetuity, places restrictions on the code using it that the GPL doesn't allow, and quite simply can change at any time. Not a good answer to rely upon there.

You mean like installing the codecs already on my machine and exposed by my OS's graphics subsystem? Nah... that'd never work. Next thing you know, they'd be using the OS to print documents, too.

Even if they spend the money it still would not be legal. Since GPL requires that others have redistribution rights, and patent licenses violate that. Its not just the fee, its what you have to sign to pay the fee.

I wish software developers would stop playing politics with software and just deliver products that work

what part of the word 'politics' didn't you understand?

::sigh:: I write free software, for free. While I try to "just deliver products that work" by ensuring cross platform compilations work, and adding features users request, I am not always CAPABLE of complying due to patents.

I was going to add support for H.264 encoding and decoding to one of my projects, but I simply can't afford the license fees or to charge the users for each copy.

So, I'm faced with -- use external libs which is not exactly "just works" if you don't have the lib installed, eh?

For the video conference feature I chose to write my own codec to avoid all these "politics", sure, it's re-inventing the wheel, but screw it, I want my product to just work...

As it turns out, H.264 and other codecs have patented such obvious solutions that my "clean room, from scratch, never have looked at any other codec source" code infringes upon H.264 patents...

It would be great to just say, "Hey, I wrote all this code myself, it just works, everyone can use it for free", unfortunately, patents prevent me from doing so.

Serious question - why not just use the OS libraries, available on all major platforms, supporting every single codec the users already have installed and not supporting the ones that they don't have installed? Using a subsystem is not quite the same as seeing if a random shared library is on the machine somewhere, after all.

Mozilla could afford the licensing fees, but they don't wish to. They can't pass on their license to other Mozilla partners like linux distros who build their own packages, and think it's worth either the monetary cost or the cost to the ecosystem.

If my post wasn't clear, I think the short term outcome of not supporting H.264 in HTML5 is bad for the web, in the medium term it is good for the web, and in the long term it is neutral to slightly bad.

I'm mostly trying to have people consider that things can be bad for a time and still be good overall, and perhaps that this is even the most common case in legal matters. Also I wish to help people make their arguments about this topic more clear by naming and focusing on the timeframe they think is import